As the result of a fall, an individual's bones or muscles may get hurt, after, for example, suddenly tripping over something or falling from something. In general, young children, who are inexperienced in moving their bodies, or elderly people, who have difficulties in moving their bodies, frequently experience fall accidents. In addition, other groups of people, such as medical patients, etc., may be susceptible to falls.
Furthermore, since falls occur as accidents, and regardless of intention, falls are highly likely to cause dangerous injuries. Thus, depending on a subject's state, a fall accident should be handled in a short time. In many cases, however, surrounding people may not recognize a state or position of a subject who has fallen. Thus, the opportunity for timely treating a person injured from a fall may be missed in many cases.
Recently, a fall detection method has been developed, which accurately recognizes the position of an individual that has experienced a fall and rapidly deals with the accident. Specifically, the fall detection method determines whether a person fell using a sensor mounted on the person, and accurately recognizes his/her position using GPS information of the sensor.
In this fall detection method, which uses a sensor, however, data should be wirelessly transmitted when a fall accident occurs. Thus, battery consumption or fall detection errors may increase, or filtering efficiency for error detection may be reduced. Furthermore, since this fall detection method detects a fall accident based on sensor information according to the motion of the person who has fallen, when the person provides sensor information, such as waving a hand, running, or colliding with something, the fall detection method may determine that a fall occurred based on the sensor information even when the above motion is not due to a fall accident.
Therefore, there is a demand for another fall detection method capable of reflecting other information as well as sensor information to determine whether a fall has occurred in order to accurately and rapidly detect a fall.